Silver Crystal’s Strategy to Reach the Fan for All Seasons

Silver Crystal Sports has licensing deals with the major sports leagues.Credit
Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times

In the winter of 2004, a labor dispute between the National Hockey League’s owners and players led to the unprecedented cancellation of an entire season. Players didn’t lace up their skates, and arenas sat empty for some 1,200 scheduled games.

For Adam Crystal, a Toronto businessman, the lost season didn’t just deal a blow to his social life and his personal identity as a Toronto Maple Leafs devotee; it was also a huge setback to his business.

At the time, his company was called Alpha Crests, and it had recently installed what Mr. Crystal called “microfactories” in N.H.L. arenas across North America to allow hockey fans attending games to buy customized team jerseys on the spot. Alpha Crests provided the letters and numbers, along with pressing machines and training for store sales employees. During a game, fans could walk into a stadium store and have their favorite player’s name, or their own name or nickname, pressed onto a team jersey using the microfactories. A salesperson would take the order and operate the pressing machine.

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Adam Crystal, left, and Jeff Silver at their Toronto office.Credit
Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times

When the hockey strike hit, the market for Mr. Crystal’s products plummeted, and his microfactories lay fallow. “They ended up collecting dust for a year,” he said.

He was restructuring the company because of the financial fallout when he met Jeff Silver. (They both had the same accountant, who introduced them.) Mr. Silver, a sports obsessive who had recently graduated from college, was “a breath of fresh air and a lot younger than me,” Mr. Crystal said. He also had substantial experience with buying jerseys, in that he owned 25 of them. The two teamed up, and the company was reborn as Silver Crystal Sports.

As co-chief executives of the company, they acted based on lessons that Mr. Crystal learned from the N.H.L. strike. To protect themselves from the vulnerabilities of a single-sport business, they expanded beyond hockey, signing licensing agreements with the National Basketball Association, National Football League and Majestic Athletic apparel, the official jersey supplier of Major League Baseball. It was a move that served them well in 2011 when N.B.A. players and owners were embroiled in a five-month labor dispute that delayed the start of the season.

Sports merchandise is “a very crowded marketplace,” said David M. Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California. “The competitive environment is very fierce.” To give itself an edge, Silver Crystal Sports began using technology. In 2008, the microfactories evolved into kiosks with digital touch screens featuring images of jerseys. Customers could type in their preferred names and numbers, preview their creations on-screen and then watch as the numbers and letters were pressed onto the shirts. The kiosks, which operate under the name Fanzones, have been installed in 400 locations in North America, including in stadiums and sports stores.

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Silver Crystal Sports makes kiosks that create custom jerseys.Credit
Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times

Silver Crystal Group, the parent of Silver Crystal Sports, sells the Fanzones kiosks to retailers for $5,000 to $100,000, and the kiosks are customizable, too. For some retailers that order a large quantity of letters and numbers, the company provides the kiosks at no additional charge.

Mr. Crystal and Mr. Silver call their kiosks retail entertainment, because buyers can play with the touch screens; the custom production process takes up to 10 minutes. But there’s a practical side to the kiosks as well. The system is meant to blunt the financial blow that retailers experience when certain jersey inventories become obsolete, such as when a popular player is traded to a different team or a player is convicted of a crime. For instance, sales of the N.F.L. quarterback Michael Vick’s jerseys decreased sharply after his arrest on charges of running a dogfighting ring. Instead of printing thousands of jerseys with players’ names and numbers, retailers can leave the jerseys blank until the orders roll in.

The kiosks can also allow store owners to nimbly respond to demand for jerseys when a player experiences a surprise hot streak (think Jeremy Lin when he played for the New York Knicks) or is signed or traded to a team, according to Mr. Crystal and Mr. Silver. When the N.B.A. player LeBron James returned to Cleveland, Silver Crystal Sports did a “massive, massive” amount of business selling numbers and letters for new jerseys bearing his name, Mr. Silver said.

The customized jerseys cost $20 to $95 more than blank standard jerseys, depending on the complexity of the design. At the more elaborate and expensive end of the spectrum are the snakeskin-patterned letters and numbers that the kiosks churned out at the baseball All-Star Game in Arizona a few years ago.

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For some retailers that order a large quantity of letters and numbers, Silver Crystal Group provides kiosks at no additional charge.Credit
Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times

This month, the company is introducing a smartphone ordering system to let fans customize and order jerseys without having to leave their seats during a game. Some retailers will deliver the jerseys to the customer’s seat, and others will require them to go to the closest kiosk to try on the jersey and pay for it.

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to lure fans to games, according to Professor Carter of the Sports Business Institute. This is partly because tickets are expensive and improvements in television-screen technology have enhanced the home viewing of sports. So “teams and leagues are doing whatever they can to make sure the game-day experience is a real experience,” Professor Carter said. Memorializing a game you attended with a custom jersey might be one way to do that, he said.

While Mr. Silver and Mr. Crystal consider the sports industry to be recession-proof, that’s not necessarily true, Professor Carter says. Jerseys are among the costliest items in sports stores. For instance, noncustomized adult-size LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers jerseys cost $70 to $110; New York Yankees jerseys can cost more than $200. And when times are tight, fans sometimes scale back on large expenditures.

“The discretionary spending of avid sports fans remains very, very strong, but it’s not immune from cutbacks,” Professor Carter said. “Once the price point gets high, and the economy is struggling, people say, ‘O.K., what’s the real value in this?’ ” Instead of buying two jerseys, they might purchase one, he said.

If Mr. Crystal learned anything from the aftermath of the N.H.L. strike, it’s that diversification is crucial to his business. He says that his company is not limited to sports and that it can customize any type of feature in a retail environment. He envisions Fanzones-style kiosks in a variety of places. If a restaurant wants kiosks for customized burgers, for example, “we can build that technology for you,” he said. “This is our next frontier.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2015, on Page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Strategy to Reach the Fan for All Seasons. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe